False alarms tie up firefighters

Auckland firefighters have been called to more false alarms than any other type of emergency over the past seven years.

Figures obtained under the Official Information Act showed nearly 40 per cent of the call-outs that firefighters in the region responded to between June 2011 and June 2018 were false alarms – 57,536 out of 143,976 total incidents.

Fire and Emergency New Zealand was now having to strike a balance between wanting people to respond to potential emergencies and trying to educate people on how to prevent false alarms.

Peter Wilding, Fire and Emergency NZ’s national manager of fire investigation and arson reduction, said it was annoying when firefighters were tied up with a false alarm because they could not be available for when they were ‘‘really needed’’.

However, Wilding did not want to discourage people who thought there was a fire nearby from calling 111.

‘‘That has happened and there have been houses and other buildings lost significantly, and bush fires have grown and grown.’’ Wilding referred to a fivebedroom house fire in the southeast Auckland suburb of Flat Bush, which claimed the lives of four people in December 2016.

Neighbours heard windows breaking but did not immediately call 111, Wilding said after a coroner’s report was released in December 2018.

A range of unfortunate factors had caused the victims’ deaths ‘‘but the fire

❚ Firefighters in Auckland attended 143,976 incidents from June 2011 to June 2018.

❚ Over the past seven years, firefighters were called to 57,536 false alarms, 17,381 incidences involving fires that were not vegetation or structure-related, and 16,637 medical incidents.

❚ The other incidents involved special service calls, assisting the public and vehicle crashes.

was definitely survivable’’, he said.

‘‘We’d rather respond to a 111 call and find we weren’t needed because it was a false alarm, than not be notified early enough.’’

Wilding recalled working at Balmoral Fire Station, where firefighters would be called to jobs in the city.

In central Auckland, an average callout to a false alarm took 20 minutes and 25 seconds. ‘‘We used to go and [provide] backup to alarm calls and a lot of those alarm calls – I think 98 per cent, it was – were false alarms.

‘‘There’s a balance where we want people to react when they think there is a fire and not to delay that, because that’s critical.’’

However, it was important to get the false alarm numbers down, so Fire and Emergency NZ was starting with commercial businesses and construction workers, where someone might cut through a wire accidentally, he said.

‘‘It’s more the ones where we know there’s false alarms going on – let’s try and work with those to mitigate them and reduce them as much as possible. We can overcome that with good education.’’